Welcome to the club: The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ

By DJ Paulette and Annie Macmanus

In Welcome to the club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of a thirty-year music career, with help from some famous friends.

One of the Haçienda’s first female DJs, Paulette has scaled the heights of the music industry, playing to crowds of thousands all around the world, and descended to the lows of being unceremoniously benched by COVID-19, with no chance of furlough and little support from the government. Here she tells her story, offering a remarkable view of the music industry from a Black woman’s perspective. Behind the core values of peace, love, unity and respect, dance music is a world of exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. But, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space bursting at the seams with powerful women.

Part personal account, part call to arms, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while seeking to do justice to the often invisible women who keep the beat going.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526166890

Book preview

‘Imagine the DJ is taking notes while everyone in the club is dancing. Welcome to the club is exactly that, notes of a DJ – the irrepressible sunlight of DJ Paulette. A fascinating insight into the music business by a northern Black woman.’

Lemn Sissay, poet

‘Icon. Trailblazer. Activist. Warrior. DJ Paulette has led the way for Black women and women everywhere in a global music industry riddled with racism and misogyny. She has blown apart the myths. This is a magnificent book. A manifesto for our times and a rallying call for the future.’

Maxine Peake, actor

‘Paulette continues to light the way for others, building in relevance and significance, wowing crowds, annihilating dancefloors. I would recommend Welcome to the club as an essential read for anyone and everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed it.’

Craig Charles, actor and DJ

‘I now realise the weight of the obstacles and challenges Paulette overcame, her fortitude to compete in male-dominated arenas, the racism she undoubtedly encountered. Her mettle and contribution have clearly opened doors for the diversity and equality we strive for today.’

Simon Dunmore, DJ and founder of Defected Records

‘Paulette is a pioneer, a ground-breaker, a trailblazer and never afraid to hold a mirror up to the world to show that there is still so much more to do. A self-assured shimmy of a book that instantly transports you to the dancefloor and beyond. I love it!’

Arielle Free, DJ and radio presenter

‘When I met Paulette, back in early 1990s Manchester, I don’t think any of us understood what we were getting out of nightlife beyond raw enjoyment. Now we’ve had a chance to re-evaluate those codes, to understand how much they meant in forming us. This book explains why nightlife matters. Paulette understands the philosophy of the nightclub, because she was there when it was at its very best.’

Paul Flynn, author of Good as You

‘Paulette has experienced the highs and lows of dance music culture. This heartfelt book tells the story of what she saw and learned with her distinctive style, warmth and wicked wit.’

Matthew Collin, author of Rave On

‘Paulette is someone I’ve always respected, admired and been inspired by. This book is beautifully written, incisive, dry, witty and real – true Mancunian honesty. What an adventure and a truly fascinating life.’

Rowetta, singer

‘With fierce resilience and passion, DJ Paulette’s travels through clubland reveal her personal triumphs over life’s adversities. A book filled with music and love, positivity and enthusiasm.’

Princess Julia, DJ and writer

‘DJ Paulette turns notable moments in her thirty-year career into a close listening experience. There’s a musical quality to this book that sounds like what Black women DJs have tried to tell the world – our unique experiences turn any party into a lively classroom. Paulette leaves curious readers waiting for the next chapter so they can hear it like a song.’

Lynnée Denise, DJ and scholar

‘DJ Paulette’s essential read doubles up as an alternative history of dance music, told from the middle of the dancefloor. It’s a sparkling ride through high times and low, documenting racism, sexism and homophobia with fabulous clarity. A full-bodied celebration of the ways music can save your life – and can also make your life.’

Emma Warren, author of Dance Your Way Home

‘Any list of the pioneers of the Manchester club scene is not complete without the name DJ Paulette. We are so proud of her.’

Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester

‘I arrived in 1990s Manchester, found a place to live and a job then got dragged up, went clubbing and there was DJ Paulette on the decks. Her energy and music were the soundtrack to my queer gender-bending dance floor years. If music and clubbing played an important part in your life, then so will this book.’

Kate O’Donnell, actor, writer and maker

‘Written with warmth and passion, this book continues the trend of female professionals telling their stories – the good and the bad ones – so that we learn how clubs can once again become places of peace, love, unity and respect.’

Beate Peter, The Lapsed Clubber Project

Welcome to the club

Welcome to the club

The life and lessons of a Black woman DJ

DJ Paulette

Manchester University Press

Copyright © DJ Paulette 2024

The right of DJ Paulette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6690 6 hardback

First published 2024

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover design: Nicky Borowiec

Image credits: Cover photo © Lee Baxter

Author photo © Lee Baxter

Typeset

by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

Contents

Foreword by Annie Mac

Introduction: welcome to the club (Belleville or Bust)

1Finders keepers: in the beginning

2London to Paris: Eurostar

3Bad behaviour: shit shags and crap hotels

4FAQs (female asked questions)

5How to kill a DJ

6Sane as it ever was

7Lifetime VIP: a manifesto

Appendix: future forces

Discography

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Notes

Index

Foreword

Annie Mac

DJ Paulette is a foremother to all of us, a woman who has tirelessly worked to share her passion for music with the world, and who has become a doyen of DJ culture as a result. Her contributions to electronic music are vast and varied; she has worked in radio stations, record labels, magazines, recording studios and, most powerfully, in DJ booths, where she has been resident DJ in some of the most prestigious clubs in the world. This is an entire life dedicated to clubs and club culture, and now, it’s documented.

Welcome to the club is a heartfelt and at times both hilarious and frustrating account of Paulette’s own story, spanning the scenes she has inhabited, the characters she has encountered and the many twists and turns and ups and downs of her career. Upon reading it, I felt that all-toofamiliar jolt of anger in realising that I have never read a book about dance music culture written by a woman, let alone a woman of colour. DJ Paulette’s perspective is totally unique, and therefore invaluable.

Throughout my own career as a DJ, I never felt like I had female role models in DJing. Coming through the radio ranks, I was able to champion and platform the music movements that came and went: the Ed Banger and Justice dance rock explosion, Scream and Benga era dubstep and then a new generation of house superstars with Disclosure at the helm. And in the clubs, as I grew more confident as a DJ and a curator, it was always the same. I was always the only woman on the line-up. In the last decade I have witnessed a slow surge of young female and non-binary DJs coming through the ranks, and seen the industry begin to be held to account for the chronic gender and racial inequality on line-ups, in the charts and in the board rooms. Change has begun, but the pace is glacial. There is still so much work to do.

DJ Paulette has been here for over three decades, a Black queer woman, breaking through the gates of the boys’ clubs, enduring the knock-backs and fighting for a seat at the table. A virtuoso when it comes to her craft, she has endured the prejudice, the privilege and the bias of the industry around her to stay true to the communion, unity and utter joy of the dancefloor.

Her story is a vital and vivid document of a remarkable and pioneering career. A career that we should all bear witness to in order to truly understand our beloved dance music culture in the UK. I wish I had met Paulette early on in my career. I wish I could have sat with her and just listened. Now we all get that privilege.

Introduction: welcome to the club (Belleville or Bust)

It’s a balmy, Parisian evening in 2011, and I’ve been on one of my favourite walks past Père Lachaise, that grand city within a cemetery, to meet Gilles Peterson and friends at Mama Shelter.¹ I had been living and DJ’ing in Paris for seven years and, call it loyalty or tradition, whenever Gilles was on the radio I emailed in for a shout out, and if he was in town, I made the trip to see him, Rob Gallagher, Sean Rollins and the Brownswood record label crew. After his set at La Bellevilloise² we hung out back in the hotel bar. Our group had fallen into an animated discussion about music and DJ’ing – I was telling some random story about touring in France when Gilles turned, looked at me and said, ‘Yeah but – do you still LOVE it?’ He scrutinised my face then laughed cheekily. ‘You still LOVE it, don’t you! When are you going to write that book, eh? – You should read that Anthony Bourdain book – Kitchen Confidential … write something like that.’

I took the hint, bought the book, read it in a couple of days then tried to write something profound but I couldn’t find an edge. I had no heavy AAA-list names to drop because I wasn’t a regular in the green rooms that mattered. I’ve had designer handbags and underwear that has lasted longer than my longest relationships and could report only average sex with a series of low-rent, short-stay partners. I had no wild fashion stories and had taken nowhere near enough drugs to qualify as a bankable rehab rescue case. Yet still I wrote. I showed samples of my work to a few people. Laidback Luke told me that most DJs he knew only wanted to make music and didn’t read books. It scored nul points from my Commissioning Editor friend at Random House who said that he only signed best-selling celebrity titles to his roster. Frank Broughton³ told me that while he could see I’d got the chops to write, without the sex, drugs and rock and roll it wasn’t that interesting really. Deflated, I put my writing dreams to bed.

But Freud writes, ‘the repressed will always return’, and people say that everyone has one book in them. Freud is right and those pesky people have a point. So here is my story.

I’m DJ Paulette. After thirty years in the business (which is surely long enough to hope that people know that I play records in clubs for a living), I still use the ‘DJ’ prefix as an aide memoire. Secretly, it bumps me up the listings on alphabetical order line-ups and poster credits but don’t tell anybody. Like Madonna, I’m mononymous. I only use my second name in private because it’s my surname by marriage, and since I’ve been divorced for twenty-six years there’s no point in giving that side of the story too much oxygen.

This is not a complete history of electronic dance music nor is it a definitive DJ Paulette biography: quite a few places, people and events are missing so don’t @ me. It takes a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of my DJ’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. After all, ten people at a party will never tell the same story.

It starts in Manchester in 1992 with its backdrop of the Aids crisis, Section 28, recession, the Poll Tax, the backdraft from the SUS⁴ laws, Tim Berners Lee’s introduction of the World Wide Web and the completion of the Channel Tunnel; it finishes somewhere in the present after Little Simz and Kendrick Lamarr headlined and closed Glastonbury Festival, after we celebrated fifty years of London Pride, stuck a pin in the moment when Beyoncé’s global number one album Renaissance dropped to save house music⁵ and we lost Queen Elizabeth II (RIP).

I have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outsider knowledge: opinions and views are my own. The themes, situations and issues have been put into context with the pivotal people I have worked with, for and alongside. These are power-players and decision-makers who were there from the start, who are important contributors today, and who are taking the music industry future forwards to create a diverse and more robust place for us all to work and enjoy without prejudice. I stitch this patchwork together with a little history, some socio-cultural commentary, a splash of politics, and a lot of love. It’s a living history; we still have miles to go before we sleep.⁶

Before I became a DJ, I got my first taste of working in the music industry when I was eighteen years old. My Calvin Klein Obsession-soaked application worked, and I was called up to audition as an on-air reporter for the new youth magazine programme called Saturday Express on Piccadilly Radio 261. It was to be broadcast every Saturday morning hosted by presenters Becky Want and an eighteen-year-old Chris Evans.⁷ Working in the studios, watching the presenters, learning to record interviews with a Marantz and edit on a Studer A820 with a white chinagraph ‘grease’ pencil and a razor blade, reviewing the singles and meeting the stars gave me the bug for doing something music-industry related with my life.

By day, I was employed as an (unwelcomed and largely unsupervised) management trainee, based at the Cooperative Wholesale Society Travel and Banking Group, but at the weekends and by night I was moonlighting recording the club / gig reviews and random reports that I’d pitched and managed to land with Chris Whatmough and John Clayton.⁸ I hated my day job, but I loved working for Piccadilly Radio 261.

Reporting for Saturday Express gave me a pass into one of the best clubs in the world. I called the Haçienda head office and told them that I was a journalist working on a story about nightlife for the Manchester Evening News and Piccadilly Radio.⁹ It was a total blag but it worked. Guest list for me and five friends with free drinks? Sorted. Access to the DJ and VJ booth with interview time set aside? Sorted. Lifetime VIP membership for me? Sorted. Once my friends had drunk all the free drinks and were happy dancing I disappeared upstairs. I spent the rest of the evening watching the visuals and the dancefloor from above and bouncing between the DJ booth and the VJ booth where I chatted with the filmmaker Dani Jacobs next door. Back at Piccadilly 261, as brilliant as I thought my feature was, it was considered too grown up for Saturday Express, so they canned it. Their loss. My gain.

Music, clubs and entertaining people has been my happy place since my mum, Blanche, went into labour with me and my twin while she was singing onstage at the Free Trade Hall (as family legend goes). I was fifteen when I started clubbing, using my sisters’ birth certificates on rotation for ID to gain membership to clubs like PiPs, DeVilles, Rotters and The Ritz. When I had my eighteenth birthday at Berlin Nightclub on Deansgate I’d already been a regular there for two years. I was always able to talk my way into anywhere and I was so keen and affable that the security waved me through without the need for payment.

Later years saw me singing in bands and recording studios as a lead and backing singer in hype spots like Out of the Blue, Spirit and Roger Boden’s ‘The Cottage’. I was a second lead singer for a band called Bernie Hot Hot,¹⁰ and we performed live at the International I and II supporting Curtis Mayfield and Deacon Blue on separate occasions. A few years later I recorded backing vocals for a band called KAOS, performing showcases at Metropolis and SARM West in London.¹¹ I wrote my own music for a while, remaining unsigned and unpublished before returning to my academic path when I was accepted for an English Literature degree at Manchester Polytechnic in 1991.¹² Not long after that everything went wrong, and I became a DJ.

I hit the ground running with a party at the Number 1 Club on Central Street, then was given my first significant residency at a monthly party called Flesh at the mythic Fac 51, The Haçienda in Manchester. I discuss Flesh, the Haçienda years and the Haçienda renaissance with the people at the sharp end of operations: Paul Cons, Peter Hook, Luke Howard, Kath McDermott and Ang Matthews¹³ in the chapters that follow. My residency at Flesh enabled me to join a boys’ club which changed my life, as I rose through the ranks to play in the booths of some of the most prestigious clubs around the world.

DJ’ing made it possible for me to move to London and make a career out of working in the music industry, mentored by some of the best in the business. I introduce you to Dulcie Danger – the warmup DJ from my residency at the Zap Club¹⁴ – and discuss the incredible years working at Mercury Records where I earned my first gold record from a mix compilation for Polygram and a second one for my work with Roni Size and Reprazent with the mighty Gilles Peterson MBE.

Caroline Prothero was the first person to book me to play at the Ministry of Sound in London. She was the first woman in the straight world whom I heard loudly banging the drum for equality in clubs and the music industry. I discuss gender politics, meeting people at their level and having big ideas with her. From 1998 to 2001 I was the Promotions and A&R Director for Azuli Records. I compare management notes and bringing a small independent into the world of major-label styled promotion with the then owner, David Piccioni.

At the turn of the millennium, I became a full-time, freelance DJ and a resident for Ministry of Sound International, touring Asia, India, South America and Europe. I also discovered that I had a love for and a growing fanbase in Paris¹⁵ and Montreal. I’ve got up to all sorts, good and bad, while DJ’ing: the chapter ‘Bad behaviour: shit shags and crap hotels’ is a brief confessional with penance included.

Encouraged by my growing popularity, I moved to Paris in 2004. Four months later I was given a police escort through the streets of central Paris to play a historic outdoor party to 30,000 people for the Solidays organisation. For the next eight years The City of Light shone down on me. Termed by many as ‘La Belle Epoque’, my years as a resident at Mix Club have passed into legend. Paulette in Paris is a book on its own.

The years 2012–15 were when pretty much every business decision I made was wrong and I have never felt less welcome to the club. I felt stuck in a groove I could not jump out of. I forced quit, simultaneously resigning from Radio FG, my residency at Queen Club and my booking agent. My failure to act on the red flags already raised meant that I moved to Ibiza only to bang my head against the impenetrable white walls for two years. Making the decision to leave Ibiza was hard but life on the White Island was unsustainable for me, a single, freelance DJ. I’d flown too near the sun and fell to earth, making a soft landing in Manchester.

In the ten years since I left Paris, I have learned a lot about myself, my career and this industry. Living in Manchester has given me the space and the strength to build some bridges and begin a crusade to stake my place in the history of the culture itself. First, I reconnected with my family. Then I broke everything down to ground zero, and slowly came to know the people and the city I’d been away from for twenty-one years. I had to find regular work, my own place and people who believed in me enough to help me make something of my talents and not talk me out of them like they had in Ibiza. The bars in Manchester’s Norther Quarter slowly provided this. I